WONG: Shutterbugs don’t go to museums for the art

My hate-on only got worse in Paris, tourism capital of the world. It’s not only due to the hour-long lineups for airport-style security checks, the gender imbalance in washroom stalls, rapacious cafeterias and serious dearth of benches on which to rest.

In the age of narcissism, paparazzi-visitors are the newest plague. They move from masterpiece to masterpiece, snapping photos of artwork, like dogs marking hydrants.

Digital cameras and smartphones mean museum-goers now spend their time taking pictures of pictures. Like trophy hunters on safari, they bag the greatest hits. Some methodically work through museum floor plans.

Few pause to look at the actual painting. Presumably, that’s for another day, when they download the photos and e-inflict them on friends.

At the Mona Lisa, the Louvre’s biggest hit, tourists pressed up 20 bodies deep, restrained only by a wooden railing, a stretch-separation barrier and five harried security guards. It was like a bad rock concert: the crush, the roar of the crowd, the homage of raised cellphones.

Think I’m exaggerating?

The Mona Lisa, one of da Vinci’s smaller works (77 centimetres by 53 centimetres), is the most-visited piece of art in the world, attracting some six million gawker-photographers a year.

I don’t understand the impulse to take a bad picture. The Louvre gift shop sells a decent Mona Lisa postcard for one euro ($1.40). It also posts the painting on its webpage.

Google Art Project first launched the idea of Internet art. Now, the trend among museums is to put their collections online. Amsterdam’s Rikjsmuseum even urges the public to transfer high-resolution downloads of its Rembrandts and Van Goghs onto tattoos, plates and T-shirts — for free.

We’re so used to living online, it feels anachronistic to queue up, buy a ticket and stand in front of artwork. But even then, instead of looking at the painting or sculpture, visitors peer through viewfinders, seeing only a tiny, once-removed version of the real thing.

With many of us now photographing our every move and meal, museums have become just another motherlode of consumption. We mine a bit of culture to increase our personal worth, each photo tangible proof that you were there because you almost surely won’t remember a thing afterwards.

I’m being too hard on the public. The real blame lies with museums.

They’re stingy with information. They stick small-print labels at waist height or lower. Worse, they rarely provide social, economic or political context.

No wonder so many folks look bewildered. Instead of only giving the names of the artist, the title of the work, and the year and place of creation, why not explain, for instance, the mysterious presence of monkeys in so many 17th-century Dutch still lifes?

I assume the primates reveal early globalization, the seafaring nation was already trading with India and Asia. I later learned that monkeys symbolize moral disorder.

Why not tell us who paid the artists? That might explain why Rubens painted 24 shamelessly flattering, out-sized scenes from the life of Marie de Medici, wife of Henry IV of France. Yes, she commissioned them.

And why, in a 1594 painting by an unknown artist, is one poker-faced naked woman pinching the nipple of another naked, equally expressionless woman? The “pinchee” was Gabrielle d’Estrees, then pregnant with the illegitimate child of the same Henry IV of France, who forced wife Marie to raise the child.

Quel scandale! Alas, the Louvre highlights the painting on its map, but discloses zip.